My Story

Throughout my working life I always felt that there was “something missing”. I always loved a new challenge but the excitement of a new job would always wear off pretty quickly and I would find myself “bored” once I felt I had learned what I could from a role.

I had a successful career and was promoted very quickly and many times however, within a year to 18 months of a promotion or new job, I always found myself looking for something new to keep my attention.

I thrived in high pressure environments as long as there was a shiny, new thing to play with. Promotion, starting a new project, dealing with a major crisis such as a store burning down… but once the excitement wore off there I was again.

No matter what I did, I always found myself back with the feeling that that there was that something missing again.

In my late 20s I gave up my career and travelled extensively which gave me a wonderful feeling of freedom and I learnt so much about myself in the process. With the help of my travel companion (now my husband), I dealt with many of my demons and returned home with more confidence.

University, teaching, more travel followed until I found myself in a job that I felt happy with for longer than I had ever done in the past.

Mid-Life Crisis?

However, as a successful career woman in my late 30’s, my world was turned upside down after the birth of my son in 2005 and from that point on I found things gradually building to what eventually became breaking point.

I had always been successful at everything I turned my hand to and I imagined that with my skills I would find being a mother a breeze.

How wrong can one girl be? Whilst I loved my new son unconditionally and adored being with him, financially I had to return to work when he was 7 months old. As an older mum, I knew I could not work full-time and leave him in childcare all week. There was no point in having waited so long for him if I did that!

So I determined to work part-time and have the best of both worlds. How hard could that be?

I could never have imagined how much of a struggle it would be to balance all the different areas of my life! How could a successful career girl find it so difficult? I found myself being pulled in all different directions… feeling guilty when I was at work and not being able to concentrate on my son fully when I wasn’t.

The house was a mess, I battled the baby blues and all the time wishing I could be at home like many of my friends in more fortunate financial circumstances.

I began to think that there must be a better solution and explored many options for replacing my income. I tried buying and selling clothes on ebay and spent endless hours listing, packing, wrapping and queuing at the post office. Yes, I made some money but nowhere near what I needed!

I turned to the Internet and learnt how to build an online business and despite some success still felt that there was something missing. My health was suffering and I knew that something was not quite right but ignored my symptoms for a couple of years due to an earlier (un)fortunate misdiagnosis.

The Turning Point

Finally, early in 2010 I was diagnosed with chronic endometriosis, an illness that affects millions of women every year but that still remains relatively unknown, undiagnosed and “un”talked about!

2010 was a year which was totally dominated by its diagnosis and treatment and I underwent 3 bouts of surgery, one of which was pretty major, and I had almost 6 months off work as a result.

The crippling pain of the early part of the year was replaced by devastating emotional lows and was followed by some pretty major re-thinking about my life. At the time it felt like the end of the world but today I realise that it was exactly what I needed to wake up and realise the changes that I needed to make and looking back I wouldn’t change a thing!

I learned that sometimes we need to experience something of a “mid-life crisis” or a wakeup call from the universe in order to wake up, evaluate our lives and regain control and one of the things I am grateful for was being given was some time to do some soul searching.

At the beginning of the year I certainly felt justified in wallowing in self pity but I quickly realised that it wasn’t going to help me get through the year ahead and so I began to take some positive action.

Now, as I look back on 2010 I am aware that, in different circumstances or more accurately with a different perspective, I could be looking back with a great deal of sadness, pain or regret.

A Life of Purpose

Instead, I’ve discovered the purpose of my life and have realised that all of my life experiences have been leading me to this point.

In January 2011 I decided that I needed to leave my career and do something that I loved, something that filled me with a passion and purpose that had been somehow lacking in all of the jobs that I had previously done.

I came to the realisation that all of the things we love to do, our passions, hobbies and what we stand for as well as all the jobs that we have done, no matter how strange or seemingly isolated, fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and come together to create a business that totally embodies who we are and what we are born to do.

The trouble is for most of us it is as if the pieces of the puzzle are scattered all over the place and are all face down with no picture to guide us. We need to collect together enough of the pieces and really examine them before we can even get a sense of how they fit together let alone see what the picture is. But once we do, it seems amazing that we didn’t see it before!

Over the course of a few months I realised that none of the jobs I had done were an accident. Even those jobs that I had done for only a year which seemed to stick out like a sore thumb in my career had been there for a reason.

I knew this but I couldn’t work out how they all fitted together.

The Pieces of my Puzzle

Most of my career has been in Customer Service Management and HR Management, later HR consultancy. I have always been a natural coach so I recently trained to be a life coach.

I have a first class degree in applied computing and can totally lose myself in anything technical to do with computer applications. I am a qualified teacher and as much as I loved teaching, I couldn’t bear the politics of the education system so I only taught for one year after qualifying. I also found that working with a class of 30 children meant that I couldn’t have the impact on the children that I wanted. I always worked in schools in an area of deprivation and seemed to have the biggest impact on children with behavioural issues or low self esteem.

Next I went on to set up and run all of the computing courses for a university college. During this time I taught on the courses and ran a Children’s University course called “Wacky Wicked Websites” where I taught 8-10 year old children how to build websites in html. This was in 2001 when this was still quite a novel thing to be doing.

With another 10 years of HR consultancy after this it appeared to be a blip in my career but I continued to educate myself about online marketing, building websites, SEO and social media as this was always something I loved to do. Much of the work that I did around websites was about parents building an online business from home and learning how to create a business that could run largely on autopilot so that they could spend time with their families. However, whenever I tried to make money building websites someone would always come along and undercut me and I realised I had to do things differently.

Despite deciding that I couldn’t make the IT side of things work and not advertising my services in this area, it was the one thing that people kept offering to pay me to do without me advertising in any way and so I kept coming back to it to work out how I could turn it into a business.

The people that wanted IT support and coaching from me were usually coaches, healers or spiritual entrepreneurs; people who were mainly just starting out but who had a paralysing terror of technology. They wanted support from someone who they could relate to, who understood them and could nurture them as they developed their skills; someone who could break things down into simple bite sized chunks that they could deal with. They didn’t want a techie who would just take the order but someone who would educate them about what they needed and of the future possibilities in a language that they understood. But I also realised they wanted to give something back to society and this began to give significance to another area of my life at that time.

I had many experiences through my childhood and teens which indicated a calling to work with children but I wasn’t able to pursue this as a career at the time. However, after I found out that I couldn’t have any more children in 2010, my husband and I began to pursue the possibility of fostering, believing that we had a lot to offer teenagers who might be struggling with their lives. Whilst fostering wasn’t actually possible for us at this time, I began to realise that my teaching skills and my connections with schools in my last job might begin to make more sense.

I knew that I also needed to use my coaching skills and given my own history realised that so many parents would relate to my story of wanting to be able to work from home around their families. Helping people to uncover the business that was inside them all along and then show them how to turn it into an online business began to make more sense than just building websites for people as I began to see that they needed the coaching support to find the pieces of their puzzle and how they fitted.

One night everything came together and I finally saw how everything fitted together!

My Vision – The Big Picture

My vision is of a social enterprise where there is a complete cycle of giving and of mutual benefit; a process where young people who are disadvantaged by the education system who may be excluded from school or disillusioned with education are taught REAL skills from which they can earn a living or start a business with.

I am planning to teach young people online marketing, website building and social media for business but in a way that is real and not theoretical. With real projects rather than assignments, with real clients rather than textbook exercises and in real time with real deadlines risking real money!

In my coaching business, the majority of people I help are mums wanting to build a business from home but struggling to see their own strengths and skills come together into a business. The majority of my clients who need IT support or websites are coaches, healers and spiritual entrepreneurs who want to help others. In the future, I envisage taking a client brief for a website for example and using it as a real live case study with my students.

I can see me working with my students to understand the brief and to translate it into a product that can be presented to the client. It might be that each student works on their own design with my support and that we are able to present a number of options to the client for feedback. The client might choose a design from one of the students or a combination of elements from the group. The students begin to get real work experience for their CV and build a portfolio as they go.

The client gets the website and support that they want overseen by me but also gets a real sense of social responsibility.

Whilst I will be helping people to visualise and build a business or learn to build their business online, at the heart of my vision is building self-esteem, self-confidence and a belief that everyone regardless of background can go on and build a future with real possibilities.

Through my journey, I discovered that I’m here to help and inspire other people to find the courage to make changes in their lives. So, if like me you would like to finally find that “missing something” and transform your life then I hope that the information I share on my blog might be inspiration for you.

And, if any part of my story resonates with you and you feel that I might be able to help you find your missing something, find your voice or reclaim your power – feel free to contact me and see how I might be able to help.